Parents working as health professionals during the pandemic

Abstract

Purpose: To evaluate family routines, stress, and burnout levels of health professionals who were also parents during the pandemic process.

Design and methods: This study is a quantitative descriptive study. A total of 380 parents who were working as health professionals in a training and research hospital participated in this study. Data were collected using a data collection form. Percentage distribution, mean, Kolmogorov-Smirnov, Shapiro-Wilk, one-way MANOVA, and McNemar tests were used to evaluate the data.

Results: In this study, 64.7% of the participants were women. The rate of participants whose children were in preschool was 31.8%. A total of 82.4% of participants indicated that their role of parenting was affected during the pandemic. A statistically significant difference was found between the Parental Stress Scale, the Emotional Exhaustion, and the Personal Achievement scores according to (p < 0.05). A statistically significant difference was found between the mean scores of depersonalizations of the participants who had infant children, during the play period, and in the preschool period (p < 0.05).

Conclusions: It was determined that family routines of health professionals who were parents during the pandemic were affected, and they experienced stress and burnout due to these altered routines. It was observed that health professionals who had children, especially in preschool, experienced greater stress, because the children were young and more dependent on their parents.

Implications to practice: Health professionals needed to be provided with support, taking necessary precautions for their family life and family routines during the pandemic process.

Keywords: Health professional; Pandemic; Parent.